Saturn Northern hemisphere EnhancedSaturn Northern hemisphere Enhanced
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
Saturn Northern hemisphere EnhancedSaturn Northern hemisphere Enhanced
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Saturn, Jewel of the Solar System, Enhanced.
Spectacular view of Saturn's north pole hexagon by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The view is in natural color, as human eyes would have seen it and completes a mosaic as made from 36 images shot on Oct. 10, 2013.
When Cassini arrived in 2004, it was winter in the northern hemisphere and it sported a bluish hue. The golden tones dominated the southern hemisphere, where it was summer. As seasons turned and northern spring came in full swing, colors begun to change as well. Golden tones started to dominate the northern hemisphere and the bluish color was confined to a tighter circle around the pole.
The rings shown here include Saturn's main rings. The rings known as the C, B and A rings -- listed here in order of closeness to Saturn -- are easily seen.
Cassini is currently in a set of tilted orbits known as "inclined orbits" that allow it to swing up over the north pole and below the south pole. Much of Cassini's time is spent close to the equatorial plane, where most of Saturn's rings and moons are located.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Original image and text by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Cornell. Further image enhancements and post processing by Weston Westmoreland.
You can learn more about what drives me in my blog:
http://inspiringthoughtsandimages.com/
Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
June 9th, 2018
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